My car got picked up for transport today. Watching the guy load it was incredibly stressful. I kept thinking "Okay this is it, this is where he drives it off the edge." He was so casual and confident about it all too, even joked around about having me try it. Incredible!

My cat makes driving home really problematic because he travels so poorly. I had to medicate him for the plane ride out here. Since I have to fly home with the cat, it didn't make financial sense to fly back out and drive the car back.

I wouldn't have wanted to do the drive back by myself anyway, and I had friends who offered to do it with me but it would involve taking time off work for them since it's such a long drive. One of these days I'd like to do a cross-country drive though!

Boy yeah, i'd love to road trip across the US one day on my bike. I mean to do Land's End to John O'Groats over here to test the water, I want to do a Euro road trip at some point too.

I've never ridden on the wrong side of the road before though, I worry I might forget and plant myself into a truck.

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I'm sure you'd get used to it really quickly. I've been looking into possible driving trips around Britain and I'm continually surprised by how close together everything is! I'm thinking if it happens, we will probably end up going more up north, and not by you though. Maybe I will even go bother Decks.

I got to take a tour of the S-IC Test Stand yesterday (not a public tour, it was arranged by a coworker)! It's the test stand they used here at Marshall Space Flight Center to test the first stage of the Saturn V rocket. In other words, five massive F-1 engines all firing at once! It's also been used to test the Space Shuttle's main engines among other things. This massive structure stands about 25 stories tall, making it the second tallest structure on the arsenal. (The tallest is the Dynamic Test Stand, used to shake the entire Saturn V stack.) It was very cool being able to go up this structure, although my fear of heights was working overtime! (Oddly enough, I'm just fine in an airplane.) We went up on the main deck just above the flame diverter, then up on top of one of the concrete pillars, and finally all the way to the top. Although I only made it ~24 stories up, just shy of the top. That's because after you exit the elevator and go up a flight of steps, you then go outside the structure onto a narrow catwalk/stairway that's just a metal grating to get to the top, and you can look straight down between your feet all the way down to the ground. Yeah, I'm happy with my sense of self-preservation.